Like Earth, but on Mars
My Contributions
- Engine design / Architecture
The engine revolved around an ECS, wich was new to many in the team. I was in charge of designing the engine and helping other members understand the new concepts. - Entity Component System
Developed entirely from scratch, with cache optimizations in mind as well as ease of use, since other group members were new to ECS. - Binary Space Partitioning Collision
There was planning for having a lot of enemies and potentially a lot of collision checks. I implemented a BSP solution to optimize collision checking, which meant not every collider needed to be collision checked. One tree was for static colliders and one tree updated on a tick an contained dynamic colliders. - 2D Sprite Animation
I Implemented a simple animator for frame based sprite animation to display on a billboard. - Various Gameplay Features
Most of the game mechanics was implemented after the foundation of the game was complete. I imeplemeted various things, such as detecting ground level differenses and making the main character automatically jump over them, raycasting into the scene from the mouse position and making the glowing helper follow the ray hit location, and finally the games puzzle logic.
What is this?
This small game is a adventure puzzle game, where you control two characters at once. An astronaut has crashlanded by an abandoned outpost on Mars. With the help of a small glowing helper, controlled by the mouse cursor, the astronaut has to find a missing piece to repair his spaceship and escape. The light helps the astronaut keep his sanity as well as repel monsters inhabiting the outpost.
How was it made?
The game was created with C++ and DirectX11 as a small school project. The game features several techniques developed entirely from scratch. Other than my contributions, these were particle effects, AI with path finding, and deferred rendering with bloom.
Julius Wendt 